Thoughts on Did You Know? 3.0

Here's the presentation.

The clip -- slick, graphically appealing, jump-cut edited like a video game, or a bad movie, or a bad movie based on a video game -- is a fine commercial for awareness of international technological growth rate, and the facts (factoids? factlets? factty snacks?) are certainly interesting. But without any greater context or substantive backing, and delivered in a long sequence of seconds-long snippets, it's difficult to draw any meaningful conclusion from the whole. "So what does it all mean?" Well, presentation, it means that this is all nifty stuff, and fascinating to really think about, and maybe some people should think about this stuff more often and expand their horizons, and that's perfectly valid.

But to me, the presentation itself raises a greater concern with this "new" age of exponential growth (though, this "exponential" growth can't be new; the very nature of exponential growth means that the growing starts slow and snowballs, and human birthin' is surely exponential and nothing new, but I'm nitpicking vocabulary): as more information becomes available, unfiltered, often unattributed, in great heaping mounds, valuable information becomes more difficult to discover within the white noise. These are neat facts: where'd they come from? May they be trusted? While the statistical flashcards prompt us to think about big questions, we should maybe include some thoughts about sources, incongruities, and biases.

I'm not saying I don't cherish the nifty democratization of information and publishing in the interweb age; I think it's grand, and have gleefully added to the noise myself, generally via profanity. But I also don't necessarily believe that if Twitter murders Journalism in the conservatory with a Kindlestick, that's a good thing. I like that there are professionals who are payed (often as much as tens of dollars) to discover information, attribute and source their facts, and present those facts to the public in clear language. I like the cloud, and I like well-edited material. We need homeostasis.

Also, I wish that Fatboy Slim song wasn't stuck in my head again. Hey, it's new years, 1999, all over again, and the only songs that exist are this one and, um, Prince's 1999! Y2K! Everybody freak out!

ADDENDUM (8/19/09, 9:00 PM)

Per additional instructions, I watched Mr. Winkle Wakes -- man, if this decagenerian technophobe is freaked out now, just wait until he drags his two-dimensional carcass to a Pixar film. His poor mind will explode.

This is cute -- the premise is well executed, and suceeds in making the point that educational practices and philosophies should adapt with the times, but remain mired in the past. It's a gross generalization, which fails to account for the development of a lot of progressive educational strategies in recent years that have little to do with the utilization of technology, but the point is valid. Schools here in the futuristic year(s) of 2000 need to participate in the future.

Lucky for him the school he visited didn't have one of those scary mechanical metal detectors that are tragically commonplace in urban districts, else he wouldn't have made it past the front door.